


ocean blue, what have i done to you

by goddcoward



Category: Naruto
Genre: Infinite Tsukuyomi, M/M, Madara wins, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Post-Fourth Shinobi War, Sad Ending, Unhealthy Relationships, i dont know if ill make a sequel but god i want to because writing this hurt so much, like it's agonizing for me to read so. enjoyyy lmaoooo, no porn with feelings but madara really wants there to be, spoilers mads is fucking crazy, this is just fucking angst, this is titled 'oof ouch' in my word doc and yeah that's exactly what it is, well. not-relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-12 02:06:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goddcoward/pseuds/goddcoward
Summary: in which the fourth shinobi world war ends with uchiha madara's victory, and senju tobirama sees the flaws in his reasoning for what is perhaps the first time.





	ocean blue, what have i done to you

**Author's Note:**

> OOF OUCH
> 
> that's really all there is to say on the matter
> 
> title from the song 'sun' by two door cinema club which im fucking obsessed w its so good
> 
> saiga is the ten-tails and i love her. im sorry sweetie you dont deserve it
> 
> im not previewing im just posting im wild and free woot woot

the world is ending.

the ten-tails rages, a pale behemoth bigger than a mountain, ancient and furious and so, so powerful.

they cannot stop it. all of the strongest shinobi in the world, many of the strongest shinobi who are no longer of this world, and they are helpless before it. ranks of people fall to the thrashing of its giant white tails, and more to the purple-black supernovas of its bijūdama. 

madara laughs and laughs and laughs.

maybe he was right, thinks tobirama. maybe there is no peace, there is no happiness. maybe, he wonders, there is nothing at all.

in any case, there won’t be after the juubi is finished. he doesn’t know what uchiha is thinking and he never has, but in this moment, dead so many times over, impaled on the ground with the black chakra rods and utterly helpless to watch the earth fall to pieces around him - in this moment, he looks up at madara, and the emotion swirling in his chest is not anger, is not hate, is not frustration. 

tobirama looks up at madara and he is saddened. this man was equal to hashirama, was _good_ at some point before he lost himself, was – was better, more empathetic, _kinder_ than tobirama himself has ever been.

perhaps it’s a sign that he too is falling into madness, but he wonders, just a little bit.

he wonders.

the sky shatters into a hundred different shades of black and madara shrieks something out in victory as he summons meteors and hurls them to the earth below, delighting in the explosions they create, _laughing_ at the screaming. 

there’s – there’s _no way_ he could have always been like this. no way. hashirama is many things, he is too giving and flexible and open, but he isn’t outright _delusional._ the village. perhaps it was the village; tobirama had always hated that fucking hat, had taken it only because there was no one else who could do it, had been delirious enough with blood loss to name _saru_ as his successor, had been responsible, directly or not, for many of the events that drove konohagakure to become the exact opposite of what they’d intended it to be, so long ago.

likely it was the wars. again, tobirama is guilty, here, for killing izuna, but he looks back and he regrets only the way it destroyed the last of madara’s composure. it was combat, kill or be killed, and there was still a chance to save him – that stab wound wasn’t immediately fatal and tobirama has no doubt hashirama could have healed it – so madara isn’t blameless either, but…

there are only so many times a person can be traumatized by violence and death and grief, over and over and over again. only so many times a person can hold the weight of a broken world on their shoulders without breaking, somehow, some way. 

the edo tensei, thinks tobirama, should have been burned along with the rest of the impossibilities he’d created while senseless from sleep and drowning in his own unbearable sadness.

unfortunate, that orochimaru did what he did. he was so brilliant, had such potential, and he, too, was failed by the world, by a world tobirama had such a large hand in creating. 

hindsight is flawless, but there’s nothing anyone – not even him – can do about much of anything right now, and tobirama is self-aware enough to recognize that he can’t feel sorry for himself, not when he’s inadvertently caused so much pain.

he remembers promising to himself that he would wipe that kind of agony from existence. he remembers itama laid in the ground at seven years old, and how he hadn’t felt warm since then.

the chakra rods are just cosmetic. they’re perfectly serviceable restraints, yes, but it’s a show of power and dominance from madara. look at how _small_ and insignificant you are, the rods say. you aren’t even enough of a threat to require properly detaining, the rods sneer. you are _nothing_ and you will die, again, like _nothing,_ and you wasted all your time on earth.

tobirama would probably have a bigger issue with that if those weren’t all good points, all of them true in some way. he’s not butsuma, he never has been, but…he sees, now, how he didn’t do enough to prove that, how he was so assured of his own convictions that he didn’t bother explaining anything, didn’t bother sharing anything. 

he wrenches one arm out of the ground and then another. madara does not notice, or he does not care; they’re equally likely, and he’s busy getting himself some perspective by reminding himself that he’s god.

well, thinks tobirama, doing his best to remain objective, nobody’s perfect.

the idea of applying that particular ideology to uchiha madara as he literally runs the apocalypse is almost enough to make tobirama laugh, and it’s then that he’s decided.

he didn’t have any idea, but whatever all of his too-little too-late introspection means, he – he can _try._ insane one-off experiments are a scientist’s friend, after all. 

he doesn’t remove the chakra rods from his arms when he brings his hands together and he ignores the way they click and scrape against each other. he rips all of his thoughts, every single one of his regrets and all of his newly-found perspective, and he condenses them into a small sphere that rapidly solidifies until it’s glimmering bright red, sharingan red.

the little ruby globe sparks like electricity as it flies slowly towards madara and dissolves into the back of his head, or maybe just gets lost in his mane of hair; it’s enough to finally get the man’s attention. he turns around in a fit of rage, and soon enough tobirama’s vision goes dark once more.

\--

madara’s done it. he’s won. he’s _finally_ victorious, and not even that demonic bastard senju with his last-second failures was capable of stopping him – nothing is, not anymore. saiga has been subdued, and now the entire world lays beneath madara’s sandals, like it was always meant to. 

it doesn’t matter. the ten-tails can go ahead and destroy it, because this world is paltry and weak and inferior; it will be nothing in comparison to the perfect world he’s going to build, a world where he’ll have izuna and azuki and all of his brothers and hashirama by his side and his clan alive once more, as they all should be. 

maybe, madara thinks with just a hint of crazed obsession, tobirama will be there too, and he’ll be immortal, so he can be tortured and killed over and over and over again and madara won’t ever have to stop hurting that horrible man who stole his last brother from him.

(maybe they can finally go on dates in the park and sleep late in the mornings and fuck whenever they want to. maybe madara will have a husband in his fantasies like he never did in his lifetime. maybe tobirama will love him back; innumerable years of fighting and hissing and constant insults have proved well enough that he never did, not in this lifetime.)

the infinite tsukuyomi truly is a dream, after all – why not? 

the sun sets over the steaming, smoking corpse of what used to be the battlefield of the fourth shinobi world war, and the god tree is feeding. the energy of enough dead bodies suspended from its branches allows it to spread its roots across the world and continue to steal sacrifices; when it’s finished in a few hours, every person on earth will be within range, and it will finally be time to cast the genjutsu.

madara spends that time hacking tobirama’s dirty, undeserving corpse into hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces with his gunbai, and it’s vindicating in a way nothing else has been before. 

soon enough, the moon has risen, and the pressure that’s been building behind madara’s eyelids for years is finally released in a single jutsu that explodes in the sky like the eruption of a volcano and dyes the moon in bloody sharingan red. the pinwheel pattern of his eternal mangekyō takes shape on the surface of the moon and slowly begins to spin.

by the time the jutsu nears completion, madara is the last living being on earth. he is the last person ever who will have to suffer a world without peace. from now on, _everyone_ can have utopia – even dirt like senju tobirama can be happy. 

(happy with madara, happy in his arms and in his heart and in his bed and on his cock, happy _belonging_ to him as he always should have. it was senju’s damnable contrarianism that separated them before they could ever truly be together, and now?

now that will be gone, or at least diluted enough that tobirama will be his as he was always meant to be.)

he closes his eyes and falls back into the genjutsu with a grateful smile on his cracked face, his rinnegan deactivating and his heavy black heart lighter than it has been in decades.


End file.
